Monthly Archives: August 2008

"First, let me talk about the dreaded number of tandas a night. And here Ⅰ have to say that Ⅰ have surprised myself about the fact that Ⅰ really have transformed my point of view, and have come to place quality way, way, way above quantity. Of course, Ⅰ would rather be dancing than not… after all, Ⅰ love to dance. But if I'm given the choice, Ⅰ really prefer to have just a few really great, high quality tandas, than a full night of luke-warm, passionless, jerky or non-musical ones. And just to add to this feeling, Ⅰ have also come to see my attendance to Milongas much more as a social happening: an opportunity to greet friends and talk; an opportunity to listen to beautiful music; and opportunity to enjoy myself watching people dance and connect (something Ⅰ love to do)."

"It is hard to pick up meditation from just reading an article, but Ⅰ would like to share a few basic pointers about what meditation involves. No matter what form of meditation you follow, the basic shared principle is to quieten your thoughts and mind. We can sit in a chair for many hours, but, if thoughts continually pass through our mind then our meditation will be ineffective. Ultimately the aim is to have a mind free of thoughts. It is in this inner silence that we can experience a consciousness of real peace.
At first glance, people may find the concept of stopping thoughts very difficult. If you try sitting silent for a while, you will probably be inundated with thoughts. When giving meditation classes, the difficulty of controlling the thoughts is a common experience. However, if you sincerely try, you can learn to reduce the power of thoughts over yourself.
These are some tips Ⅰ suggest for controlling your thoughts:"

"This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.
If you survey the literature (and Iâ€™d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc Ⅾ. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.
First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is."

"Topic maps originated in work on the merging of electronic indexes and so are very much a subject-based classification technique. In fact, topic maps are organized around topics, and each topic is used to represent some real-world thing. In the terminology we used above, topics represent concepts, the same way terms in an indexing language refer to concepts. In topic maps the concepts are called subjects, and the standard emphatically states that a subject can be "anything whatsoever". We will return to the consequences of this later on."

"Rest is as important as work. In the traditional model, people worked long hours to accomplish as much as possible and get ahead in their careers. However, there is a high rate of burnout and job dissatisfaction and employee turnover in this model."

Amid mounting agreement that future clean, "carbon-neutral", energy will rely on efficient conversion of the sun's light energy into fuels and electric power, attention is focusing on one of the most ancient groups of organism, the cyanobacteria.